I cant wrasp the context of I would like to fource people to spam /2 for hours (specially now) then leave that option intact for the people that have an appeal to that while also haveing an option to particpate in content without haveing to be forced to socialize if you dont desire. Both options are there. The problem is the people that complain about comunities also dont make a differance they dont take charge and just go for the easy way out. I can bet REAL money that Anarchor doesn't talk when he joins a World Boss group or tries to makes friends when he joins a LFR group. I can bet.

Wanna know what I did, back in TBC, when none of my friends were online (either because I was playing really early/late, or they had RL stuff to do)?

I sat at the Shattrath bank (Scryer, if it matters) and trolled trade chat.

For srs.

Also, Blizzard has made it easier to make/keep friends with at least one feature...RealID. I've dine lowbie BGs and RealIDed people on numerous occasions so that we could run more...even ended up guilded with a group of them (I server xferred) to raid with for a time. The fact that other people don't do things like this is not Blizzard's fault.

The problem is lack of player effort because there "no incentive anymore" (to oneself). If Blizzard handed out free 522 epics for every "friend" you invited, you know how many friends everyone would have?

At least 13.

Having friends should be it's own reward, however, and with the current trend of ALL internet communities, that's not common practice anymore.

Question: has Blizzard made it IMPOSSIBLE to see content with your friends?

It's GhostCrawler :P
He could write a 10-word sentence and than write an essay on each word to explain what the word means and people would STILL read other things into it.

"The sky is blue!" - GC
Forum: "GC hates rogues!".

I think you give him too much credit.

Community: So when are we going to see X and Y classes nerfed. Literally 90%+ of the arena bracket over 2k has class X on their team, and 75%+ of the heroic encounters on worldoflogs are being topped by all of class Y. Just go look at the numbers yourself, it isn't hard.

GC: We think class X and Y are fine. Maybe in like 6-18 months we will realize that you are right and nerf them.

Community: You do realize that X and Y healing classes can put out more HPS and have a lot more raid/tank cooldowns than class Z..? and that every heroic guild out there wants classes X and Y..?

GC: We think the community focuses too much on numbers like HPS and cooldowns. What you should really focus on is keeping that subscription up.

Community: Do any Blizzard employees actually do competitive PvE or PvP? There seem to be a lot of obvious imbalances that you haven't addressed, even though it has been months...

GC: Of course! Just the other day I did the first boss of LFR while my level 90 friend ganked a level 30 through the great tool of CRZ... and in my own experience I can tell you that X, Y, and Z classes are perfectly balanced.

The OP has changed his mind about his one sentence opening statement has meant on at least three occasions over the course of eleven pages I'm not surprised he completely misses the boat on the meaning of other people's statements.

The problem is that the word 'friends' does not equal or is anything like the same as 'other people' in this context. It's extremely difficult for me to think that this isn't plain as day and obvious on the merits. Words and their meanings matter. Playing with friends and playing with other people is clearly not the same thing.

what the dude meant was that they removed the absolute necessity of having people you actually know be online and willing to raid for you to see the content, which is awesome since wow's community went from people who enjoy video games to people who use video games as a filler in their lives. personally the only thing i like about lfr is you can practice the bosses. helps you get cooldowns and boss timers learnt.

Playing with friends and playing with other people is clearly not the same thing.

I thought that was Ghostcrawler's point.

If your friends are offline or busy, you can still play some of the game content, which is very convenient and doesn't make your time available to play the game feel completely wasted. Time not wasted is awesome.

However, adding content that you can easily do without having to have your friends online will probably mean that less content designed for groups of friends will be added.

I'm literaly aversed against the philosophy that not needing friends (wether they are RL or online friends, made in the game) are not needed to see content. Wether they added the -option- to do it with other people (who are just a bunch of randoms) is beside the point.

I imagine that the distinction between "people you don't know" and "people you get to know" is what Anarchor was talking about the entire time with GC's tweet since he seems to have tried to distinguish RL friends and "online friends" (who were obviously strangers at one point):
In which case, GC acknowledged the problem with the "but we didn't add anything in place" line. He meant that there's no facilitating making new acquaintances.

Okay... So could Anarchor and GC find a middle ground together here?

On the one hand: Battletags.
It's not completely Blizzard's fault if you don't speak to people in dungeons who you find to be good players any more and don't even ask them to Battletag befriend you.
Even without ever doing LFR in Cata, or playing in Mists, my guess is that nobody in this thread has ever added a friend from LFR groups

Why is that? The option to benefit from this new friend system is technically there, is it not?

No (On the other hand). Not for current content, it's not.

I'd guess Anarchor would accept the proposal of cross-realm technology if it encouraged doing relevant things with people in them, but they don't encourage it and there is still that previous tier restriction from Cataclysm among other things - if I'm not just projecting.

If your friends are offline or busy, you can still play some of the game content, which is very convenient and doesn't make your time available to play the game feel completely wasted. Time not wasted is awesome.

However, adding content that you can easily do without having to have your friends online will probably mean that less content designed for groups of friends will be added.

I'll prefer to play with family/friends/guild if I have the option. That's always first and in that order. But if none of them are around or already busy, I'm perfectly happy to know that there's something else I can do, whether it be some solo stuff or queue up for something. And when it comes down to it, I don't begrudge anyone who decides there's enough to do to keep themselves busy for a long time and don't feel the need to speak to anyone.

Being forced to be social is just as bad, if not worse, than not having the means to be social.

The problem is that the word 'friends' does not equal or is anything like the same as 'other people' in this context. It's extremely difficult for me to think that this isn't plain as day and obvious on the merits. Words and their meanings matter. Playing with friends and playing with other people is clearly not the same thing.

No, but he's either implying one or the other. And both don't do him much in the way of making him look good here.

No, that's what you make it out to be. It's just a game with a lot of people (more then multiplayer games) and a persistent world.

I played since launch and I never had friends or a good social experience. Don't assume everyone had that, just because you did. What I remember is if you refused to suck up to the elitists who could raid, you would simply never raid. They'd completely destroy your reputation for ever, and there was nothing you could do about it. I prefer not to suck up to those people, so I never got to do group content, except at the very end of Classic with a bunch of outcasts, like me, and bad players. It wasn't all that fun... Now I can just ignore those elitist jerks and still experience all the content there is.

Ok, as a disclaimer I only played this game since BC. So if you're talking about Classic, you may be right, I don't know.

Now, I remember when I first started (as a night elf) there's this cave in the night elf first area, filled with furbolgs. Now, unlike now, you couldn't really solo the furbolgs really well, the whole area was a mini-dungeon. If you died and had to come back... well... let's just say that wherever you ressurected there were 3 furbolgs attacking you, if you were lucky only 1 (though remember that you started with less then full life). So you needed people. And that's how I met my first people with which I talked and grouped in the game. I saw 2 druids fighting their way in and asked if anyone wants to group. And they did.

Later I was invited to a guild by accident. Now, I ended raiding with that guild. Now, I'll admit, it was not a huge guild and we only got to raid Kara and Zul Aman in BC with a few trips to Maggy (he didn't die). In Wrath I raided a bit more with this guild (Naxx, finished in its patch, same for Sath and Malygos) then we decided to merge with another. It ended not going so well so switched to another. This was a guild with a few of those "elites" you talked about, got to see many Ulduar hard modes but the guild leader was a prick so ended leaving the guild. And then I switched to a largely social guild. I admit, they weren't as great as to do hard modes in Ulduar or ToCr heroic, but I did see the whole of ToCr on normal. So we did raid. And we also saw ICC fully, by the end of the expansion I even got to get to Sindy on heroic.

Bottom line is, I didn't kiss anyone's ass. I was nice to everyone I met if they were nice to me and if they weren't I was not nice. Because... that's normal in human relations. And yet I saw most raids on at least normal level. Now, with LFR, you can't even do that anymore, you need a special mode that you could do even while watching tv. There's not even a challenge. And you know why? Because people who don't even know eachother are hard to coordinate.

Also, from all I read about Classic, anyone seeing with rose-tinted glasses forgot a lot about it. So I give you that, in Classic making groups for harder content might have been hard, but from the end of BC and into Wrath that became easier. True, raids became a bit easier too, so people could make mistakes, but we didn't need automatic tools to group us and teleport us to dungeon.

MMORPG aren't about gear or leveling or fighting monsters, they are about the social experience !

You don't have friends because it allows you to do dungeons. You don't have a guild because it allows you to raid: it's should be the opposite!
You play because it allows you to meet and interract with other people. And even if you're more of a shy/lonewolf, you can interract with them via trading or just helping a quester once in a while.

Because really, if the community bothers you, why not just play a solo game ? Skyrim have way more features than WoW. If all you want is fightning and shinny gear, go play Diablo. etc. etc.

Problem with WoW is that it's not a good mmorpg anymore and it's not a good solo game either. So the two kinds of players aren't happy.

They don't understand this game at all. The people who come and stay are here because of friends and family.

And again with this nonsense. I play the game, because I like the game. If I want to socialize with friends and family, I'll go to Facebook, Twitter, Skype or their house. I've played since launch and never had IRL friends or family play, nor did I make any friends and I still enjoy the game a lot.

Also, being put in a random group does not equal 'solo'. Solo means playing alone. Playing in a group is never solo. It's your choice that you don't want to communicate with strangers. In Classic you grouped with strangers, too, but it was somehow more social, because it took you an hour to find someone? It makes no sense.

Before LFR only a minority of players raided full stop. Even during Wrath with pugs galore it still was not the majority of the player base raiding. (more people raided pugs in wrath than prior in TBC/Vanilla).

LFD came in to help people run dungeons in Wrath, while dungeons were popular its safe to say that not everyone found getting a group easy. I had mostly no problems but sometimes I struggled to get a group and spent a few hours in trade. LFD solved that, you get a group made for you and you get in and get on with it. LFR was brought in to as they saw how good a tool LFD was.

LFR has been tweaked since DS with personal loot and staggered releases to ensure the minority players in normal and heroic do not abuse this system as they clearly did before. It still needs some tweaks but its getting there imo.

All blizzard did was ADD to the game, BUT players are odd animals. People cry about the lack of community and I do agree somethings been lost. Blizzard only needs to improve the normal raiding experience and give guilds more incentives to raid as a group. I would propose nerfing 10man normal and 25man normal. Keep heroic hard for those that wish for a challenge. You would see more pugs this way. Also give a guild group (so a 2/3 majority guild group in a raid) an extra drop per boss from the loot table. Also add in 2 or more items to the raids loot table that you can only get in normal mode/heroic mode. That way theres loot in there that you would not normally get. Provide other incentives like it to get people into those raids (these are just examples im sure you guys can think of better).

As for LFR for people like me who while we've done heroic raiding before/hardcore raiding. I no longer have a solid time table of when I can raid its at odd days and times. Pugs could fill the gap but I disliked some of the ways pugs were formed (must have achievement of last boss to enter the pug!? made me make my own pug 90% of the time when people did that). LFR means I can login see if a mates online grab a group with them and queue up. I also try to interact with my raid. Why not? I would rather try and talk to the people there than sit there in silence.

To sum it up for TL DR:
Blizzard added to the game with LFD/LFR
They need to give some better incentives/rewards to normal mode raiding and heroic raids, and in particular guild runs.
People should try and improve the community them selves, not just rely on blizzard who also should try and improve the community if they can.

Blizzard might as well just make WoW a single player game with multiplayer features. I wonder if they even remember why they put the word "world" in World of Warcraft.

---------- Post added 2013-05-14 at 04:27 AM ----------

Originally Posted by madrox

No, he didn't admit to any such thing. I'm one of the 1.3 million who can't be arsed playing at the moment, but I really hate seeing people mangling the english language in this way.What GC said was that they removed the need to group with specific in group content by introducing group finder tools but they didn't implement ways for players to value the people that have been found for them in the group finder. So, actually that quote means the opposite of what you claim it does. There are literally a ton of GC comments you can use to prove your point of him "losing it", this isn't one of them.